KINSHIP BY COVENANT: A CANONICAL APPROACH TO THE FULFILLMENT OF GOD'S SAVING PROMISES

KINSHIP BY COVENANT: A CANONICAL APPROACH TO THE FULFILLMENT OF GOD'S SAVING PROMISES by Scott W. Hahn Yale, 589 pages, $50

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the Anchor Bible was the flagship series for "scientific" biblical scholarship in the modern mode: historical, philological, and religiously neutral. The Anchor Bible Reference Library (now the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library) soon emerged to provide a series of equally magisterial monographs on major biblical themes. It is somewhat surprising that one of the newest entries, Kinship by Covenant, comes from the pen of Scott Hahn, an ardent Catholic apologist.

Hahn's project is ambitious: to defend the New Testament...